Every Moment A Lifetime
by laffers18
Summary: Booth reflects on his partnership with Brennan, pre and post 100th. A graduation gift for the amazing Sunsetdreamer, cross posted with RositaLG's 'Bones Je'taime'. OS


**A/N A one shot written for the lovely Sunsetdreamer, as a congratulatory 'she kicks ass' present for graduating from graduates school! She rocks...and now you all know it too :)**

**Her lovely friend RositaLG asked some of us to write a little something as a congrats, and they are all posted under her profile (which is in my favourites!). The title is 'Bones Je'Taime'...I would suggest reading this there, because then you get to read even MORE fics by people a lot more talented than I :)**

**Thank you JMHaughey for the beta and the prompt...even if I went a little (okay okay..a lot!) of point!**

**Ren, you are awesome and I adore you...in a non creepy, non stalkerish kind of way. Mostly ;)  
**

_**You're in love with Dr. Brennan.**_

It shouldn't have surprised him that she had the guts to say this to his face, but it does. She's his oldest friend, knows him almost as well as he knows himself and yet…it knocked him for six. He's so used to pretending to everyone else (and yes, sometimes even to himself) that he isn't desperately in love with his partner, that he doesn't quite know how to react when someone says what everyone has known for years. He's in love with his partner. He's in love with his strong headed, independent, genius, 'doesn't believe in love' partner.

_**Right, right yeah, and uh tell Bones how I feel.**_

His response to her statement makes him laugh, even now, because he made it sound so _easy_. As if all he needed to do was walk up to her, tell her he loved her and they would walk off into the sunset together. As if they would live happily ever after, just like that. Except…he and his partner never did anything the easy way. Simple may as well have been a foreign word to them both because nothing in their lives had ever been simple. On those rare occasions when he allowed himself to think about a future together, he feared that they were so used to things being gut wrenchingly hard, that if something were simple they would mistrust the outcome. That they couldn't allow themselves to just…be happy.

_**That I love you. In a professional you know atta-girl kinda way.**_

He still can't think of that moment without wincing. Of all the ways he had envisioned revealing his feelings for her, standing in the middle of the street had not been one of them. It was just that, walking with her, being with her…he couldn't help himself. His mind drifted back to the dream that had felt so real, and a world where everything came so easily for them. He could say I love you knowing he would hear the same words whispered back to him.

But then she looked at him with that deer in the headlights look and he panicked. The possibility of rejection froze him in place, and instead of staying true to himself he backtracked in a desperate attempt to protect himself.

He could forgive himself for that, maybe, if he hadn't known the exact reason for her panic. She'd just watched him laughing and joking with the thing he used to fear, why would she trust anything he had to say?

_**This all works out eventually.**_

If you'd told him before that moment that he would cling to the declaration of a self-professed psychic, he'd have dismissed you out of hand. But in that one moment, he wanted her to be right. Needed her to be, if he was honest with himself. The idea that, eventually they would get it right (_he_ would get it right) was a heady one, one he was ready to cling to even as he told himself not to be foolish.

From that point on, he couldn't prevent the idea of 'them' from running through his mind at the most inappropriate times. Wondering how, when, why. He even started to fantasise about all the different scenarios that could lead to him getting everything he had ever wanted. He couldn't admit that was what he was doing, not at the beginning, but with a little help from a chef he eventually acknowledged the truth.

_**You're building a world around her, a family. **_

He _was_ planning how to tell her he loved her. Truth and honesty, no rushed declarations, no immediate qualifications. He even settled on a place, eventually. It wasn't the most traditional of venues, but then again their partnership had always been as far away from traditional as you could get. And it was perfect for them. It was neither his place, nor hers; it was theirs.

The problem, however, is that life has its own way of ruining even the best laid plans. For all your planning, for the time you spend waiting for the perfect moment, one small moment can bring all that crashing down around you.

_**One of you has to have the courage to break this stalemate.**_

He had a plan._ He had a plan._ And then…he didn't.

_**It's gotta be you because you're the gambler. For once, make that work for you.**_

One sentence. That was all it took for him to forget everything he knew about himself, and his partner. That was all it took for him throw all his plans out of the window, and jump in feet first. He couldn't say he was surprised at the outcome, not if he was really honest with himself. But that didn't make the pain any less, the heart ache any easier to bear. Hope is a miraculous thing, and when hope is gone what is left?

It wasn't until months later that he realised just how hard he had clung to that hope, and just how lost he became without it.

In his darkest moments, the weeks and months spent trying to pretend that he could see her everyday and still move on without her, he clung to one memory. The one moment that he couldn't quite let go of, regardless of how ridiculous it was.

_**This all works out eventually.**_

The day he raced to the airport, dressed in his fatigues in the hopes of catching her before she left, he remembered this. And he prayed she was right.


End file.
